Network administrators don't have a life and aren't important enough users? Actually Microsoft released windows power shell recently, another sorry excuse for a shell, although a mild improvement over cmd.exe.

Yeah, from a 'user experience' it 'works', from an engineering standpoint it's a total mess.

Uh, try plugging a Windows box directly to the internet (no NAT or software firewall), give it 15 minutes or so, infected. Linux has no such RPC vulnerabilities, also, *NIX has been designed from the ground up as a multi-user OS, every application that doesn't absolutely need root privilages works as a standard user, *NIX also discourages the use of 3rd party kernel modules. While again, the same can't be said for Windows, there are so many windows programs that force the need to run as Administrator because of stupid hardcoded paths, its just unbelievable, not to mention practically every program you install wants to have it's very own kernel module for the hell of it. Windows is essentially a single user OS with multiuser features bolted on, and that's been Microsoft's development methodology from the beginning, bolting crap on to a broken design.

Well you effectively did that. I don't get pissed when people defend Windows because Microsoft are rich, but because they got rich peddling the worst operating system on the planet to the masses with FUD campaigns, blatant lies, and anti-competitive practices.

Hear, hear! Exactly my point.

Simius wrote:

I don't think someone "with a real life" would care much about the command line. XD

I think that's kind of a low blow to say that people with a "real life" doesn't care about the CLI, and, also, entirely uninformed. There's some stuff that's a lot easier on the CLI, such as scripting.

Case in point, where I worked as an Applications Engineer intern over the summer, I frequently had to get screen captures off of an oscilloscope, download them to the PC and sort them. This is a painful task in a GUI. What did I do? I had Cygwin with Perl installed, so I wrote a script, in about 5-10 minutes, to prompt me for a short description of what files it was working on. It would then rename the files appropriately and put them in there own directory. This meant that it took about 30 seconds for me sort the screen captures (20 or more at a time), instead of like 20 minutes (literally) as it did in the GUI. Considering that I would eventually get hundreds of captures, this was a great time saver._________________Carlton Stedman
Gentoo Metalheads on Last.fm: http://www.last.fm/group/Gentoo+Metalheads

Personally I'd like to see these {Gentoo sucks|Gentoo rocks|Gentoo vs Windows|I'm leaving|I'm back} type flamebait threads deleted from the database, it's a waste of space and some twit keeps resurrecting them.

Personally I'd like to see these {Gentoo sucks|Gentoo rocks|Gentoo vs Windows|I'm leaving|I'm back} type flamebait threads deleted from the database, it's a waste of space and some twit keeps resurrecting them.

Agreed! Many have already made up their mind before creating these threads and the flame war is pointless._________________BlogSystem Specs

You know what all these difficulties with Gentoo come down to? Lazyness. Pure and utter Lazyness. Not on the part of the end user however, on the part of the developers. That's right Gentoo Devs, I'm calling you lazy. You know why? You should see the things I have to do with some of your ebuilds, it's ridiculous. In addition, I see tons of immature comments, worthless patches, patches that don't even do anything, patches that break things, etc. For example, I remember talks of how one of the perl updates needed patches to fix it and allow compile success. I had to wait a few revisions for that. When I tested something myself, a few sed scripts used on the makefiles generated fixed the package just fine. I won't make you take my word for it though, here's some examples:

Code:

#Fixes issues with lazy ass ppc64 compilers

Okay, I'm not one to be in favour of ppc64 compilers but that one was just stupid.

Yay for blackdown-jdk issues. This is something that entertains me a lot whenever I see emerge kde-meta run. It gets to installing packages which require a package such as blackdown-jdk and because blackdown is not pulled in as a dependency in the PROPER order, compiles fail relatively early on and in the event someone wants a long compile like kde done overnight, they lose hours of time. Come on guys, this would be so simple to fix, so just do it already -.-

Alrighty...well isn't this distro meant to give the user choice? I don't exactly call stripping cflags giving the user much choice eh? Unstable to use anything higher you say? Make it stable then. Don't be so lazy. Insecure you say? Make security patches. Again, don't be so lazy. This here is a prime example of the laziness behind this distribution. The Gentoo devs need to learn to stop making fixes that are nothing more than the easy way out and start making fixes which actually FIX the issues and don't prevent the user from keeping their freedom of choice. If you can't figure out how to make that package stable, DON'T RELEASE IT AS STABLE. Pretty plain and simple. Don't know how to do it? Why are you deving? Or, learn how. Simple, yes? I think so.

Quote:

Gentoo isn't a distro for noobs.

Newsflash you guys, 90% of the world's population are what you'd define as "noobs." And "noobs" do care about performance, but they care most about ease of use. Don't use Ubuntu, you know why? Piece of garbage. Not much works on that platform now. They can't even provide a well coded and somewhat functional ppc32 installation. Debian is so incredibly unstable it makes me sick. Installers and scripts to configure a system are not that hard to create in all honesty. So why doesn't Gentoo get its head out of the clouds and work on that stuff in order to make it a distro for "noobs?" Ultimately that's where most of the userbase is, "noobs." I know plenty of people in a group of my friends including myself that have done Gentoo-ish installer programs. Extremely simple to do, so why not stop worrying about racing through updates for a little while and get to work on what 90% of the users in the world give a shit about; something that simply WORKS and ease of use. For the average user, Gentoo is not easy, but at the same time they like its performance and the fact that it's free. However, the lack of ease of installation deters users away from Gentoo and directs them to something "better." Most cases, it ends up being Windows, just a fact that you can't deny. In my case, I do a fully working installation in maybe one hour tops. Only cause I've had to do it so many times that I got really good at it. Couple people I know, took a month and they still don't have a working installation. Sad, simply sad. My career is not in computers because I prefer living creatures to circuit boards, but point being, a career like mine requires high performance and stability and reliability. Gentoo can only give me one of those necessities. Windows gives me all three with somewhat of a limitation on the high performance part. I'm not networked very often so viruses are no issue for me n.n

All in all, I am extremely disappointed by Gentoo's lack of ability to keep devs which are not lazy. Gentoo in my opinion and in others' opinions that I know is becoming the next Windows; an OS which has nothing but lazy developers that make little fixes that don't actually solve the problem and developers which do nothing but turn a blind eye to what 90% of the userbase in the world actually cares about. I know there are some hard working devs I know of in the Gentoo project and I applaud them for their hard work and their efforts. The goal of OpenSource to my understanding was to provide a free, easy to use, reliable, secure, and powerful alternative to pieces of garbage such as Windows and Mac OS. Gentoo in my opinion currently fails at this goal.

My rating of Gentoo back in the day of 2005.0: Excellent but lacking efficient installations
My rating of Gentoo at present day: No better than a toxic waste spill

You guys say that you can't have it all. Oh but you can. Sabayon is trying to prove that as well as a few other distros. I know of one that looks particularly promising once it's finally released.

It is what it is, I won't make it seem any better or worse than it is. To all the Gentoo devs that work hard and actually do a good job, please continue that, I'd really hate to see Gentoo completely collapse. It has such a unique idea that impressed me at first but was ruined by some lazy devs. To all you Gentoo devs that fit the category of slimey, lazy, despicable, and preposterous...go join the garbage coders of Windows, Linux deserves so much better...

To all the end users that are satisfied with Gentoo, good for you, this post wasn't for you To all the end users that are not satisfied, bug reports don't work much in my experience Just keep giving your point and eventually they'll take your advice if they have any sense at all.

Off to the banned list I go I imagine XD. But it's a small price to pay for using a distro which is like Gentoo but so much more promising with their ideals and goals, and no, I don't mean Sabayon

There you go, instead of finding a proper fix, the flags are merely replaced which takes away the user's ability to use -O3.

Instead of finding out WHY it doesn't work and finding the proper fix for it, the ebuild was merely commanded to replace any -O3 when compiling with -fstack-protector-all. THAT is my issue in this regard.

Okay, well, maybe some people WANT to use -O3 with ssp. It's posts like that which become my issue with Gentoo where people just say things like: why are you doing that? don't do this, do this instead, etc. It's terrible, let the users do what they want and it's your job to fix the issue and not butt into their lives by questioning them and telling them it's a stupid idea.

There you go, instead of finding a proper fix, the flags are merely replaced which takes away the user's ability to use -O3.

Instead of finding out WHY it doesn't work and finding the proper fix for it, the ebuild was merely commanded to replace any -O3 when compiling with -fstack-protector-all. THAT is my issue in this regard.

[/quote]
-O3 is known to break stack smash protection code in so many programs it's not even funny, it's either disable SSP, or disable -O3, which do you think is the greater loss until SSP is fixed? Hell.. BIND breaks with -O2 & SSP. Given that python is such an important part of Gentoo core, having it break with -O3 is just not an option.

I'm sorry, but you're being way over zealous with the 'lazy dev' 'stripping choice' nonsense, either you want a stable system that runs faster than average, or a broke system that doesn't run. Your choice.

If that's the case, then the effort should be concentrated on fixing issues such as that, not flying through package updates and releasing so called "stable" packages for the sake of having X amount of updates in X amount of time. Instead of stripping the user's choice, why not just hold off on updates which disable the features that the user requests and release an update when the user's request can be met. I know that's not an unreasonable expectation -.-

If that's the case, then the effort should be concentrated on fixing issues such as that, not flying through package updates and releasing so called "stable" packages for the sake of having X amount of updates in X amount of time. Instead of stripping the user's choice, why not just hold off on updates which disable the features that the user requests and release an update when the user's request can be met. I know that's not an unreasonable expectation -.-

Yes it is. You can't expect Gentoo devs to debug all 22,900 packages for every upstream flaw discovered, it's infeasible. The job of a Gentoo developer is to get everything to fit together, fix rudimentary bugs, and shaping the distro itself, they're not stripping the user of choice, they're giving them choice. If you think you can do a better job, then fix SSP instead of complaining about stupid CFLAGS having to be stripped when using a hardened toolchain. While you're at it, get SSP working on gcc-4.1.

And why doesn't the entire Gentoo project stop making excuses like "why not do it yourself?" and just do it themself? I spend all day in the field working with creatures instead of circuit boards. A little more rewarding if you ask me All you guys ever do is make excuses about why you won't do it or why you think certain cflags are "stupid" and the like. It's sickening. Your guys' attitude of "if you want something done, do it yourself" has totally turned this project into a piece of garbage, worse than Debian. Maybe I will find a fix for it, but I won't submit it to you guys, maybe I'll give it to another project instead, like Sabayon cause even if I did submit it, you guys wouldn't accept it anyway cause I didn't follow the developer road. Fine, don't heed my input and don't listen to me, that's your choice. But when the day comes that Gentoo collapses, I'll only be able to say "told you so." And the only people you'll be able to blame are yourselves.

Yuusou, why are you so anger that you cannot use -O3 to compile python? Do you really need -O3 to make it work for you? If it's known not to work with -O3, I don't see any problem in disabling it. That can be a problem with upstream gcc or python, and as most distributions are sane enough to keep compiling their packages with -O2, that probably won't be a priority in upstream.

This is a community project, people don't get money by working on it, and I think that it's unfair to say it's garbage just because you cannot use -O3 on a package. Maybe we should patch gcc to avoid anybody using -O3.

If you don't like it, you're free to depart. You don't need to stay and rant._________________"I'm just very selective about the reality I choose to accept." -- Calvin

It's sickening. Your guys' attitude of "if you want something done, do it yourself" has totally turned this project into a piece of garbage, worse than Debian. Maybe I will find a fix for it, but I won't submit it to you guys, maybe I'll give it to another project instead, like Sabayon cause even if I did submit it, you guys wouldn't accept it anyway cause I didn't follow the developer road.

It's called the GPL license. Go ahead and take a look at it and understand that the fix would get back here anyway. You are so ignorant about the topics you are posting about on so many levels its pathetic.

Yuusou wrote:

A little more rewarding if you ask me

That is because there isn't such a forum devoted to what you do where you do it. enjoy the tools gentoo lets you use, eh?

Last edited by jonnevers on Sat Mar 10, 2007 10:35 pm; edited 1 time in total

It's not so much that it's the inability to compile Python with -O3 so much as that it's the principle of the devs taking a roundabout route which provides only a temporary fix that really doesn't solve the real issue at hand. That's my issue. It's things like this (not specifically -O3 stuff) that have led to instabilities which have lost me a ton of data that was mission critical. I'm angry with how the project has degraded over the past couple years from when I was first introduced to it and that's where this comes from.

And why doesn't the entire Gentoo project stop making excuses like "why not do it yourself?" and just do it themself?
snip>
Maybe I will find a fix for it, but I won't submit it to you guys, maybe I'll give it to another project instead, like Sabayon cause even if I did submit it, you guys wouldn't accept it anyway cause I didn't follow the developer road. Fine, don't heed my input and don't listen to me, that's your choice. But when the day comes that Gentoo collapses, I'll only be able to say "told you so." And the only people you'll be able to blame are yourselves.

Blimey are you feeling all right?

Quote:

It's terrible, let the users do what they want and it's your job to fix the issue and not butt into their lives by questioning them and telling them it's a stupid idea.

Right, and engineers who implement building works should just follow whatever spec the public tell them to, who cares if the thing collapses?

It's sickening. Your guys' attitude of "if you want something done, do it yourself" has totally turned this project into a piece of garbage, worse than Debian. Maybe I will find a fix for it, but I won't submit it to you guys, maybe I'll give it to another project instead, like Sabayon cause even if I did submit it, you guys wouldn't accept it anyway cause I didn't follow the developer road.

It's called the GPL license. Go ahead and take a look at it and understand that the fix would get back here anyway. You are so ignorant about the topics you are posting about on so many levels its pathetic.

I know how the GPL works thanks, and fixes don't have to be publicly announced, they can be seamless. In addition, the reason for submitting to another project (LIKE I PREVIOUSLY STATED IF YOU WOULD LEARN TO READ), would be that going from past experience, my fix wouldn't be accepted anyway -.- As for ignorance, look who's talking. You're so bent on your hero worship of the distro that you are completely immune to other people's opinions which is in my opinion the very principle which leads to the neglection of the end user. The creators of their distro love what they created so much (somewhat rightfully so), they end up tricking themselves into believing that the people that complain against them are merely talking "B.S."

It's terrible, let the users do what they want and it's your job to fix the issue and not butt into their lives by questioning them and telling them it's a stupid idea.

Right, and engineers who implement building works should just follow whatever spec the public tell them to, who cares if the thing collapses?[/quote]

That's a terrible argument by virtue of the fact that the types of things I have seen people get questioned about are not things which will break a system by ANY stretch of the imagination. In addition, that's not my point, my point is that a lot of the time, the project seems to neglect entirely what the average end user would actually care about. Having been an average end user at one point, I don't care about X number of updates in X time, I care about reliability and stability and due to the very nature of the short QA with most of the packages in portage as of late, the stability is compromised which makes the end user prone to things like crashes and data loss, etc. Same concept for the users doing what they want with their systems. If they want to use something that gives them the features they need, then a support channel's job would be to help them achieve what they want to achieve, not to rip apart and ridicule them for it just because it's not "standard." They don't care what the project's "standard" is, they care about whether or not they can have what they want and/or need.

Gentoo is written for the users.
Gentoo is written *for* the Gentoo devs, *by* the Gentoo devs. If users want to use it, then cool, but they are not the primary audience.

Gentoo is aimed at maximizing freedom.
Gentoo ebuilds have *varying* standards, depending on who the maintainer(s) are, and how much care & attention the ebuild has received, and how much support the maintainer(s) are prepared to provide via bugzilla.

Freedom is provided by the ability to use local overlays, to replace and add to the official ebuilds.

Gentoo is aimed at reliability and stability
If that were true, it would not compile everything from source on each PC, it would not allow flexibility in CFLAGS or USE flags, and it would not have a live Portage tree. In short, Gentoo wouldn't exist - the devs would be on e.g. the Debian project instead.

Gentoo devs should be working on X rather than Y.
Not even the Gentoo Council gets to order them as to what they work on, because there is no employment contract and no financial payment involved (most of the time).

I have the moral right to be righteously indignant about Gentoo.
You chose and got the software for free, from volunteers. You have no right to be anything but grateful, especially if you don't contribute back.

In summary, *all* software sucks when there is a problem with it. Open-source software sucks *less*, because people other than the software's "owner" can attempt to fix it.

It's things like this (not specifically -O3 stuff) that have led to instabilities which have lost me a ton of data that was mission critical. I'm angry with how the project has degraded over the past couple years from when I was first introduced to it and that's where this comes from.

Buy Suse or Red Hat if you want stable, supported software. They have developers paid for that. You should also do backups.

If you can't behave and start attacking people like jonnevers here, you're going to get banned. Last warning.

steveL, behave too._________________"I'm just very selective about the reality I choose to accept." -- Calvin

Actually,
when I got into Linux I wasn't expecting patches for upstream flaws. In fact, I still don't.
I'm surprised and pleased when Gentoo developers fix upstream flaws, or at least bypass them.

Anyways, 23,000 packages.. 300 developers.. Thats about 76 packages per developer to maintain, minus developers who only work on internals. I'd say they are doing a damn fine job at it.
(Correct me if the numbers I used are bad.)

Actually,
when I got into Linux I wasn't expecting patches for upstream flaws. In fact, I still don't.
I'm surprised and pleased when Gentoo developers fix upstream flaws, or at least bypass them.

Anyways, 23,000 packages.. 300 developers.. Thats about 76 packages per developer to maintain, minus developers who only work on internals. I'd say they are doing a damn fine job at it.
(Correct me if the numbers I used are bad.)

That sounds about right, but I think the package per dev count is higher personally, some devs don't have the time nor inclination to be constantly fixing ebuilds, they might prefer to work on fixing up portage or portage retailed tools, some work on the alternate package managers, some work on baselayout, I could go on all day on the different things that devs work on, but you get the idea

Plus, a big ++ on PaulBredbury's comments, developers efforts are voluntary, I prefer to (attempt to) fix problems and notify them as I come across them, or at the very least, point them in the direction I think the source of the problem is if I don't have the time or will to fix it myself rather than bitch them out.

Last edited by aidanjt on Sun Mar 11, 2007 5:24 am; edited 1 time in total

Gentoo is written for the users.
Gentoo is written *for* the Gentoo devs, *by* the Gentoo devs. If users want to use it, then cool, but they are not the primary audience.

I disagree. Bugzilla is written for the userbase, which is the primary audience. If the dev's didn't care about the userbase, then why are drivers for other hardware written? Why should NVidia provide users with drivers? For internal use at NVidia? I think not.

Quote:

Gentoo is aimed at maximizing freedom.
Gentoo ebuilds have *varying* standards, depending on who the maintainer(s) are, and how much care & attention the ebuild has received, and how much support the maintainer(s) are prepared to provide via bugzilla.

That is a highly disorganized method for producing anything. The community should all work together to provide lots of support for everything.

Quote:

Freedom is provided by the ability to use local overlays, to replace and add to the official ebuilds.

That is valid, however the default installation of portage should provide lots of options.

Quote:

Gentoo is aimed at reliability and stability
If that were true, it would not compile everything from source on each PC, it would not allow flexibility in CFLAGS or USE flags, and it would not have a live Portage tree. In short, Gentoo wouldn't exist - the devs would be on e.g. the Debian project instead.

Gentoo is very much aimed at stability. Why else would you compile it for your own configuration? So its more stable on your computer. USE & CFLAGS flags can very much enhance stability, by subtracting as well as adding software modules that may enhance or degrade stability.

Quote:

Gentoo devs should be working on X rather than Y.
Not even the Gentoo Council gets to order them as to what they work on, because there is no employment contract and no financial payment involved (most of the time).

This perhaps I agree with, if they are volunteers they should not be bound to doing certain things, however if they are volunteers, they clearly care about the project and should focus on whatever they can to enhance and better the project. People also use open source software so that they can be closer to the developers. In this sense, the public should have influence on the projects goals, and hence the developers tasks.

Quote:

I have the moral right to be righteously indignant about Gentoo.
You chose and got the software for free, from volunteers. You have no right to be anything but grateful, especially if you don't contribute back.

Free speech is a basic right. Yes you should be grateful, however you are free to criticize whatever you like. Professional people take criticisms well so that they can improve the product. To take such criticism personally is quite frankly, very ignorant.

Quote:

In summary, *all* software sucks when there is a problem with it. Open-source software sucks *less*, because people other than the software's "owner" can attempt to fix it.

That comment regarding how Gentoo is all about the devs and not for the users has made me pretty well sick and I have lost a lot of respect for the person who said that. If that's the project's true aim, then the project has been lying to everyone all along. What would the purpose of the installer be then eh? What about the massive numbers of rsync mirrors and distfile mirrors? User conferences? Support channels, website, wiki, bugzilla especially, stable arch, hard masks, etc. From past experience, if the distro were all about the devs, why would it have all of that? Personally, I would think that the presence of all of those assets would prove that the users are very much targeted and it's not at all only about the devs. And in reality, you should be coding for the user anyway. A developer only distribution seems incredibly pointless. It's counterproductive.

There is no such distinction as "userbase" and developers - the developers are users. Bugs are often filed by devs for other devs. The fact that non-dev users are allowed to be included is a privilege and not a right. There is no support contract here. Know thy place.

Let's not get confused about who develops what. The Linux kernel is not a Gentoo project, and neither are the Nvidia drivers.

Free speech is a wonderful idealism that doesn't really exist. People can and do get banned from bugzilla, these forums, IRC and (I think) mailing lists. They all have "acceptable behaviour" guidelines. And since there is no support contract in place, speech can simply be ignored.

I repeat, a developer is a user. Thus the arguments that the userbase is hugely important are negated by the developers themselves being the primary users. Everyone else is just along for the ride, although some might contribute and even eventually become developers.

This sounds harsh, eh? Well, it's realistic. It explains why a hundred "users" can rant and moan about e.g. XMMS being removed, and not make a shred of difference apart from being an annoying waste of time. Such things are not a sign that Gentoo is dying, they are a reflection that the developers make the decisions.